Its impressive estate includes a number of market leading concepts including Two for One, Chef & Brewer and Wacky.  The company’s success is guided by four main principles: its estate strategy, its offer strategy, its people and the way it does business. This fourth principle is dedicated to delivering faster, better, lower cost to internal and external customers. Spirit Group’s IT infrastructure, and its email facility in particular, play a vital role in addressing this principle. To help achieve their aims, Spirit Group engages business critical managed service provider, Applicable Limited.

 

With so many out-based workers in pubs and restaurants around the country, email plays a vital role in communication and management for Spirit Group, according to Sue Morgan, Customer Service and Training Manager. In Sue’s previous role as IT Manager her team was charged with providing the most efficient email solution. She turned to Applicable for email monitoring and support. Spirit Group hosts its own email servers and has an email administration team, but relies on Applicable’s monitoring service to provide alerts and fix any problems that might occur. As Sue explains, “We need to ensure our email system is working efficiently 100% of the time. Applicable provides 24x7 end-to-end email monitoring and notice if there is anything likely to harm performance, like spam queues for example. We’re not looking at these proactively ourselves, so were relieved when Applicable spotted a potentially serious spam queue of 60,000 emails and dealt with it.”  Applicable picked up the anomaly and went in to investigate. As a result they recommended a course of action and put a plan into place. “One of the most impressive things about Applicable,” explains Sue Morgan, “is that they finish a job to our satisfaction. They are interested in how our whole business works, not just the email. So they can see what harm a problem with email could cause us, and help us address critical business issues at important times for our business, like Christmas and Easter.”

"Applicable provides 24x7 end-to-end email monitoring and notice if there is anything likely to harm performance" Sue Morgan Customer Service Manager Spirit Group

 

“We are confident that Applicable will always provide the right system for us, they won’t force a preferred approach or solution” Sue Morgan Customer Service Manager Spirit Group

Clearly, the UK pub and catering market is characterised by fluidity. Acquisitions, divestments and mergers are regular occurrences. Maintaining consistency and continuity of service in the face of such change is something that Applicable has been able to provide to Spirit Group. In 2005, Spirit Group was acquired by Punch Taverns, resulting in the expansion of the company and the need to integrate two different email systems: Punch Taverns runs Microsoft Exchange and Spirit Group uses IBM Lotus Domino. Ensuring that the two companies could communicate efficiently without major disruption to the way each worked was vital. Applicable led a series of workshops to determine the most efficient and least disruptive way of aligning the two systems.  As Sue Morgan says, “Applicable addressed the challenge in a typically pragmatic way that protected the IT investment of each company. They listened carefully to what we wanted and proposed a solution that took into account the full context, not simply something that would work well for them.” The result is an email connector which sits between the two systems and generates a single address book, ensuring each company can continue to use its preferred system. “We are confident that Applicable will always provide the right system for us, they won’t force a preferred approach or solution, but offer pragmatic advice based on a firm understanding of both the technical and business issues,” explains Sue.

This mix of pragmatism, intelligence and customer focus was also used to address an ongoing spam issue that threatened Spirit Group’s out-based operations. Receiving email, often over a dial-up connection, became a problem for pub managers and workers who needed to download 40 to 50 spam emails a day that were interspersed with a much smaller number of genuine work related emails. Again, Applicable ran workshops to examine the challenge with Spirit Group before recommending and implementing MailMarshal, a leading anti-spam solution that stopped 20,000 spam messages in its first week of operation. According to Sue Morgan this delivered “absolutely phenomenal results. It does exactly what we want it to do and fits our profile perfectly, which is very much the way Applicable works. They really understand us and our needs.” 

In a relationship that has endured, Applicable continues to deliver ongoing remote email management and provides solutions, such as the anti-spam and coexistence projects, as required by Spirit Group. The key, according to Sue Morgan, “is Applicable’s flexibility and their absolute determination to supply our solution. It’s something we value and it’s why we continue to have great confidence in Applicable not just as a provider, but as a trusted advisor and valued business partner.”